It is surely a difficult proposition in reality to teach yourself Chinese howsoever the spirit may be willing. It is with a variety of tones and sounds that Chinese language is produced and are strange to patterns of American speech. The desire to speak Chinese or to learn the Chinese language and writing style is an admirable endeavor for many. But, anyone having a desire to learn how to speak Chinese Mandarin should be ready to buy a huge variety of books, CD-ROMs, and other formats which may help them in the process.

Frankly speaking, there is no truth in it. Chinese grammar is much simpler if compared to that of the European languages. According to complaints heard sometimes from English speakers, Chinese is a smooth language with no problems whatsoever with grammar whereas there is problem with the grammar of other languages like Spanish (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc). Each word has a fixed and single form: verbs do not take prefixes or suffixes showing the tense or the person, number, or gender of the subject. Nouns do not take prefixes or suffixes showing their number or their case. It doesn’t mean that Chinese has no grammar; in the absence of inflectional morphology, Chinese grammar is chiefly concerned with how to arrange words to form a meaningful sentence. Plus each Chinese character pronounced in one syllable, that's why when watching Chinese movies, you find that a few words can be translated into a syllable mapping in the English subtitle.

Learning Chinese can be achieved with a grand wealth of books available out there from learning Chinese the 'fast and fun way', to Chinese for Dummies to Chinese 'made easy for kids'. Of course, there are a wealth of basic courses on beginner's Chinese, and let's not forget a massive number of Chinese phrases and Chinese language dictionaries. A problem is there with these books as they are not in a format which can be easily used by the people and they are also not available at an economical price.

Now, would those all above relieve you a little bit in your Chinese language study? Hope so, but do not misinterpret this. It is never my intention to convince you that Chinese is a simple language to learn and other languages like English are much difficult. What it means is that Chinese is truly not that difficult as you thought or heard about, but different from your mother tongue, but differ does not mean hard necessarily, correct? And that hard Chinese idea won't be of any help in your study. Believe in yourself, the language is certainly not that tough to learn once that fear factor is overpowered. All the best with you Chinese language learning.

It dawns upon many people that private tutors are better to understand many basics of Chinese language than buying so many books. In rural areas you won’t find private tutors to learn Chinese language and it is expensive for people in urban areas.

The ideal way to learn any language is to be able to communicate with someone who speaks that language.